No Time

How did we get so busy?

Once, we were warned about a future of overabundant leisure. Now we’re busy complaining about being busier than ever.Credit Illustration by Nishant Choksi

In the winter of 1928, John Maynard Keynes composed a short essay that took the long view. It was titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” and in it Keynes imagined what the world would look like a century hence. By 2028, he predicted, the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. “Our grandchildren,” Keynes reckoned, would work about three hours a day, and even this reduced schedule would represent more labor than was actually necessary.

Keynes delivered an early version of “Economic Possibilities” as a lecture at a boys’ school in Hampshire. He was still at work revising and refining the essay when, in the fall of 1929, the stock market crashed. Some might have taken this as a bad sign; Keynes was undeterred. Though he quickly recognized the gravity of the situation—the crash, he wrote in early 1930, had produced a “slump which will take its place in history amongst the most acute ever experienced”—over the long run this would prove to be just a minor interruption in a much larger, more munificent trend. In the final version of “Economic Possibilities,” published in 1931, Keynes urged readers to look beyond this “temporary phase of maladjustment” and into the rosy beyond.

According to Keynes, the nineteenth century had unleashed such a torrent of technological innovation—“electricity, petrol, steel, rubber, cotton, the chemical industries, automatic machinery and the methods of mass production”—that further growth was inevitable. The size of the global economy, he forecast, would increase sevenfold in the following century, and this, in concert with ever greater “technical improvements,” would usher in the fifteen-hour week.

To Keynes, the coming age of abundance, while welcome, would pose a new and in some ways even bigger challenge. With so little need for labor, people would have to figure out what to do with themselves: “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won.” The example offered by the idle rich was, he observed, “very depressing”; most of them had “failed disastrously” to find satisfying pastimes. In particular, he pointed to the “wives of the well-to-do classes” in the United States and England, who, “deprived by their wealth” of traditional occupations, like cooking, were “quite unable to find anything more amusing” to do. As a greater and greater proportion of the population found themselves liberated from work, Keynes worried that society might suffer from a sort of generalized “nervous breakdown.” It was those who could appreciate “the art of life itself,” he wrote, who would “be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.”

Four-fifths of the way through Keynes’s century, half of his vision has been realized. Since “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” was published, the U.S. gross domestic product has grown, in real terms, by a factor of sixteen, and G.D.P. per capita by a factor of six. And what holds for the United States goes for the rest of the world, too: in the past eighty years, the global economy has grown at a similar rate.

But if we have become, in aggregate, as rich as Keynes imagined, this wealth has not translated into leisure. (When was the last time someone you know complained about having too little to do?) In terms of economic theory, this is puzzling. In terms of everyday life, it’s enough to, well, induce a nervous breakdown.

Brigid Schulte, a reporter for the Washington Post, is the latest author to tackle the question—very loosely speaking—of where Keynes went wrong. In “Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time” (Sarah Crichton Books), she explores why it is that twenty-first-century Americans feel so swamped.

Schulte begins “Overwhelmed” by trying to measure her own leisure, or lack thereof. She enlists the help of John Robinson, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who’s an expert on time use. Robinson instructs Schulte to keep a time diary and provides her with a handy Excel template. But Schulte finds that her time is too “unruly” to fit the template’s neat little rectangles, so instead she decides to record her days in little black notebooks. One afternoon, when she is eating lunch at her desk while waiting on hold with the pharmacy that supplies her son’s EpiPens and searching the Web to figure out how to obtain a death certificate for her brother-in-law, who has died in China, she calls Robinson to ask him how to classify this sort of activity. Robinson tells her just to keep filling in her diary and he will sort things out. When she presents him with her pile of little black notebooks, however, he balks. They’re impossible to read, much less analyze. “What’s this word?” he asks, pointing to an entry from 2 A.M. on September 16th.

“Panic,” Schulte tells him. “ ‘Wake in a panic.’ ”

With the question of her own leisure left unresolved, Schulte decides to head to Paris for the annual meeting of the International Association for Time Use Research. (“There’s great interest in trying to understand why time pressure is increasing,” a sociologist from Oxford tells her. “This is the hot topic in time research right now.”) She visits the Yale Stress Center, in New Haven; meets with overstressed mothers in Portland, Oregon; and sits in on a focus group in Fargo, North Dakota. “Life is stressful in Fargo,” the organizer of the group says. Ostensibly in an effort to reduce her own stress, Schulte attends a trapeze academy and leaps off a platform twenty feet high. Along the way, she discusses various possible explanations for what she likes to call “the overwhelm,” as if it were something outside of us, like the Arctic or the Amazon.

One theory she entertains early on is that busyness has acquired social status. The busier you are the more important you seem; thus, people compete to be—or, at least, to appear to be—harried. A researcher she consults at the University of North Dakota, Ann Burnett, has collected five decades’ worth of holiday letters and found that they’ve come to dwell less and less on the blessings of the season and more and more on how jam-packed the previous year has been. Based on this archive, Burnett has concluded that keeping up with the Joneses now means trying to outschedule them. (In one recent letter, a mother boasts of schlepping her kids to so many activities that she drives “a hundred miles a day.”) “There’s a real ‘busier than thou’ attitude,” Burnett says.

A second theory that Schulte considers is that “the overwhelm” is a function not so much of how many things Americans have to do but of how much time they spend thinking about how many things they have to do. A doctor who’s running through the list of groceries she needs to pick up on the way home is not actually any busier than one who’s concentrating on the task at hand, but she may feel more beleaguered. Conversely, a lawyer playing with his kids is technically at leisure, but if all the while he’s checking his phone for texts from the office he may feel that he hasn’t had any time off. Schulte terms this the “mental tape-loop phenomenon,” and she argues that it’s sapping our precious energies, so that we can’t even “decide what to think about, worrying about home stuff at work and work stuff at home.”

But neither of these explanations fully satisfies Schulte, and she keeps on searching. After a while, she fixes on the same culprit so many women before her have: men. Most American women today work; more than two-thirds of mothers with school-age kids are employed outside the home. Many now outearn their husbands; in dual-income couples, about a third of wives are better paid than their spouses. Even so, studies show, women do the lion’s—or, better yet, the lioness’s—share of the housework: between seventy and eighty per cent. If they have children, the bulk of the child care also falls to them. “Though men today certainly spend more time caring for their children and doing more chores,” Schulte writes, “it is still about half of what women routinely do.” Small wonder, she concludes, that women are more likely than men to report “chronic stress and the feeling that life is out of control.”

Schulte singles out for censure two men in particular. These are Pat Buchanan, who, as an adviser to Richard Nixon in the early nineteen-seventies, persuaded the President to veto a comprehensive child-care bill, and her own husband, who’s referred to only as Tom (but who a quick Google search reveals is the NPR correspondent Tom Bowman). Tom doesn’t even know where their kids’ dentist’s office is. He almost never takes them to the pediatrician. He is “supposed to do the grocery shopping” (the italics are not mine), but he refuses to take a list and often returns having forgotten such useful items as toilet paper. One Thanksgiving morning, when Schulte is preparing a multicourse dinner for eighteen, Tom grabs a six-pack of beer from the refrigerator and heads over to his friend Peter’s house. This holiday fecklessness triggers a crisis, which Schulte claims is therapeutic and eventually leads to a more equitable distribution of household chores. As for why, deep in “the overwhelm,” she has chosen to cook an elaborate dinner for eighteen, she never really explains.

Eighty years after Keynes first composed “Economic Possibilities,” a pair of Italian economists, Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, got to chatting about it. How could “a man of Keynes’s intelligence,” they wondered, have been “so right in predicting a future of economic growth and improving living standards” and so wrong about the future of leisure? They decided to pose this question to colleagues in Europe and the United States. Perhaps some of those they asked were women; in any event, all those who responded were men. The result, “Revisiting Keynes” (2008), suggests that Nobel Prize-winning economists, too, are perplexed by “the overwhelm.”

Several contributors to the volume attribute Keynes’s error to a misreading of human nature. Keynes assumed that people work in order to earn enough to buy what they need. And so, he reasoned, as incomes rose, those needs could be fulfilled in ever fewer hours. Workers would knock off earlier and earlier, until eventually they’d be going home by lunchtime.

But that isn’t what people are like. Instead of quitting early, they find new things to need. Many of the new things they’ve found weren’t even around when Keynes was writing—laptops, microwaves, Xboxes, smartphones, smart watches, smart refrigerators, Prada totes, True Religion jeans, battery-powered meat thermometers, those gizmos you stick in the freezer and then into your beer to keep it cold as you drink it.

“Most types of material consumption are strongly habit-forming,” Gary Becker and Luis Rayo observe in their contribution to “Revisiting Keynes.” (Becker, who died earlier this month, spent his career at the University of Chicago; Rayo is now at the London School of Economics.) “After an initial period of excitement, the average consumer grows accustomed to what he has purchased and . . . rapidly aspires to own the next product in line,” they write. By Becker and Rayo’s account, this insatiability is hardwired into us. Human beings evolved “so that they have reference points that adjust upwards as their circumstances improve.”

Joseph Stiglitz, of Columbia University, by contrast, takes a constructivist approach. People’s choices, he argues, are molded by society and, over time, become self-reinforcing. We “learn how to consume by consuming,” he writes, and how to “enjoy leisure by enjoying leisure.”

In support of this position, Stiglitz cites the contrasting experiences of Europeans and Americans. In the nineteen-seventies, the British, the French, and the Germans—though notably not the Italians—put in just as many hours at work as Americans. But then, à la Keynes, the Europeans began trading income for leisure. The average employed American now works roughly a hundred and forty hours more per year than the average Englishman and three hundred hours more than the average Frenchman. (Current French law mandates that workers get thirty paid vacation days per year, British law twenty-eight; the corresponding figure in the U.S. is zero.) Stiglitz predicts that Europeans will further reduce their working hours and become even more skilled at taking time off, while Americans, having become such masterful consumers, will continue to work long hours and to buy more stuff. TVs, he notes, “can be put in every room and in both the front and the back of automobiles.”

A third group of economists challenges the Keynesian presumption that leisure is preferable to labor. Work may not set us free, but it lends meaning to our days, and without it we’d be lost. In the view of Edward Phelps, of Columbia University, a career provides “most, if not all, of the attainable self-realization in modern societies.” Richard Freeman, of Harvard, is, if possible, more emphatic. “Hard work is the only way forward,” he writes. “There is so much to learn and produce and improve that we should not spend more than a dribble of time living as if we were in Eden. Grandchildren, keep trucking.”

The average worker is, of course, an abstraction; what matters is not the mathematical mean but the experience of real individuals trying to make real livings while raising real kids. And these experiences are likely to be very different depending on whether the individual is employed, say, as a stock clerk at Walmart or as a manager at a hedge fund. Over the past twenty years, as real incomes for the top one per cent—especially the top tenth of one per cent—have soared, they’ve basically stagnated for everyone else.

Could the widening income gap explain the Keynesian enigma? Intuitively, this would seem to make sense. The new wealth is so highly concentrated that only a very few people have the wherewithal to stop and smell the roses, which have been flown in at great expense from Ecuador.

But the facts, it turns out, are recalcitrant. As the income gap in the U.S. has widened, it’s actually lower-wage workers who have ended up with the most leisure. And it’s high earners who report feeling the most time pressure. This is true even for couples in which only one spouse works outside the home. Daniel Hamermesh, of the University of Texas at Austin, and Jungmin Lee, of Sogang University, in Seoul, are economists who have studied this phenomenon, and what Schulte calls “the overwhelm” they refer to, rather less sympathetically, as “yuppie kvetching.”

Why would yuppies work so much and then kvetch about it? Here, once again, there are several possibilities. One is that this is the defining condition of yuppiedom. In a “winner take all” economy, there’s a strong incentive to make sure you’re on the winning side, and one way to do this is to outstay your rivals at the office. Suggestively, what’s come to be known as the “long-hours premium”—the return that salaried employees effectively receive for each hour of work they put in beyond the usual forty—has more than doubled in the past thirty years.

High pay is highly rewarding, which presents another possible explanation. Suppose that a Walmart clerk and a hedge-fund manager both decide to take the afternoon off to attend their kids’ baseball game. For the clerk, a half-day’s forfeited pay could come to less than forty dollars. For the hedge-fund manager, an afternoon’s worth of lost trades may cost millions, which is a lot to give up to watch little Billy strike out looking. And what goes for the baseball diamond also applies to the school play, the anniversary dinner, even the annual family skiing trip to Vail; the disproportionately compensated have a disproportionate motive to keep on working.

Or perhaps the affluent feel time-pressed precisely because they are affluent. Back in 1970, a Swedish economist named Staffan B. Linder coined the phrase “the harried leisure class.” Linder argued that as people became wealthier they would inevitably feel more squeezed, because they would feel compelled to consume more and more goods per unit of free time. One way they’d accomplish this, he predicted, is through an increase in “simultaneous consumption.” Linder envisioned his harried protagonist “drinking Brazilian coffee” while “smoking a Dutch cigar, sipping a French cognac, reading The New York Times, listening to a Brandenburg Concerto and entertaining his Swedish wife.” Today, our multitasker might be nursing a Belgian craft beer while nibbling on sushi, reading The Economist,listening to Lorde, and booking tickets to visit his girlfriend in Stockholm, but you get the picture.

One of Keynes’s biographers, Robert Skidelsky, has called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” a summation of “many of the ambivalences” in Keynes’s thinking. Keynes was an economist who made fun of economics, a savvy investor who disdained moneymaking, a brilliant and hardheaded analyst given to airy flights of fancy. Perhaps more than anything else he wrote, “Economic Possibilities” expresses Keynes’s utopianism: not only would people solve the problem of fulfilling their material needs; they’d also solve the problem of how to take advantage of having solved the problem.

In the future, Keynes imagined, the fruits of capitalism would redeem capitalism. “All kinds of social customs and economic practices . . . which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard,” he wrote.

It is, to say the least, disappointing that things haven’t turned out that way—that inequality has grown, that leisure is scarce, that even the rich complain of being overwhelmed. And yet so much of what we do, collectively and individually, suggests that we still believe more wealth is the answer. Reëxamining this belief would probably be a good idea—that is, if anyone had the time for it. ♦

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